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bodies in the dunes to help itself, just yet, to any of their titbits on display, the wet and ragged centres of their wounds, the soft flesh of their inner legs, their eyes, the pink parts of their mouths. It bridled its wings and stretched its neck at them, regurgitating its noisy tempers as if its throat was blocked by stones, expecting these two irritated giants to spring to life like resting seals and drive it off.
    The gull became less cautious when, after several timid sorties, the bodies failed to strike at it. It pecked at one of Celice’s shoes, which had been tossed a little distance from their patch of grass. It lifted Joseph’s underpants, misled by what it took to be the smell of fish. It found a piece of broken biscuit that had dropped from the granite wielder’s mouth. Then it went to work and started on the unexpected feast of crabs, which were already labouring through their exaggerated countrysides towards the corpses. More violent death. The sudden downward beating of a beak.
    Crabs and swag flies were too numerous in the dunes of Baritone Bay – and too innocent – to be cautious. Numbers made them safe as certainly as lack of numbers had made Joseph and Celice vulnerable. The flies lined up like fishermen along the banks of the bodies’ open wounds. They settled mainly on Celice. She had been the more abused, struck seven times around the face and head. ‘Seven times killed,’ they’d say. Her hair was matted with wet blood and the syrup of her brain. One cheek was flattened by the pounding impact of the granite. Two teeth were cracked, longways. Her facial artery, that superficial lifeline from the carotid, which climbed over her lower jaw to supply the colour to her cheek and feed the brain with oxygen, had been tom in two. Blood had spread across her throat and shoulders and soaked invisibly into her summer jacket. There were dark patches on the grass and sand. Blood does not keep its livery for long. Celice was blackening. It looked and felt as if she’d been pelted with molasses. Her body made good pickings for the glucose-hungry flies.
    Celice – an age ago – had put a hand up to her face, to close the wounds or stem the flow, perhaps, or to protect her dizzy looks, her high cheekbones, her somewhat furrowed lips, her acne-purpled chin, the blood-filled lines around her mouth, her teeth. The hand was stuck in place by blood.
    She’d landed on a shoulder first, then toppled sideways. The more damaged half of her face was shielded now – too late to do her any good – by grass and sand. Her upper body was still neatly dressed for her day out: the black woollen jacket, a white, rough-weave T-shirt with the quill-and-inkwell logo of a bookshop on the chest in blue, a padded brassière. Then she was naked to her toes. The swag flies found it easiest to feast on the blood in her hair or to settle in the swampy bruises on her neck and gums or at the damage to her hands. They fed in clinging multitudes. Loose knots of flies. They made black balls of wings and antennae amongst the clots, as weightless and as dry as tumbleweed. There’s not a creature drier than a fly, as any small boy with a match and candle can testify. Some flies strayed round the bare flesh of her lower body, settled in the hair between her legs or at the tuck of her anus, but found few pickings. There wasn’t any source of blood below the shoulders of her jacket. Celice’s hair, though, within an hour of her death, began to seem more lively than it ever had in life.
    Her husband, though his body was less bloody than Celice’s and his face was only bruised, had wounds and lesions right across his chest and abdomen, plus the rifting, open fracture on the right side of his skull. The spittle at his mouth was red and succulent. His left shoulder-blade was broken; his arm was dislocated. He’d not been protected by any clothes, other than his watch and spectacles. And a wedding ring. So when he fell on to his back, his